Wimbledon

UPON the lawns of the All-England Club, Church Road, Wimbledon,’ reads the heading in The Times. ‘Patron, His Majesty, the King. President, His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent. Vice Presidents, the Rt. Hon. the Viscount D’Abernon, P. C., G. C. B., G. C. M. G.; the Rt. Hon. Lord Desborough, K. G., G. C. V. O.; the Rt. Hon. Sir Samuel Hoare, Bart., G. C. S. I., G. B. E., C. M. G., M. P.; Sir Herbert Wilberforce. Chairman, Wing-Comdr. Sir Louis Grieg, K. B. E., C. V. O.’ And so forth and so on. What is all this, anyway? A King’s Levee? An Investiture? No, it’s only a tournament of lawn tennis. If you go to Wimbledon you travel with the illustrious great.

The English are a race of pageanteers. Everything they do is a pageant. A Coronation, a Royal Wedding, a Derby, an Ascot, a Henley, a dinner, a cocktail party, even a haircut at Trumper’s is pageantized by these experts in ceremony. They love pageantry, they respond to pageantry, they eat, sleep, and drink pageants all their lives. There is a reason for this. The English like to refer to Americans as children. So we are, but not compared with the English. The English are the greatest infants in the world, and like all infants they adore pageants.

Let me be precise. What does one mean exactly by the term ‘the English’? Naturally I do not refer to Sir Robert Vansittart and the brilliant minds of the Foreign Office who rule England in their suave, adroit, and rather disingenuous manner. I do not mean Sir Josiah Stamp or Mr. Harold Laski and the gentlemen of the London School of Economics. I refer simply to England’s millions, the backbone of the nation, the middle and upper middle classes, the tanned, healthy, horsy folks one meets at Wimbledon, where there are displayed more well-groomed people and fewer red toenails than at any fashionable gathering on the face of the globe.

Wimbledon is a pageant, and the English, like the children they are, flock to it by the hundreds of thousands. Indeed, were a blind man to enter the sacred precincts of the All-England Club during The Championships (with that exquisitely unconscious rudeness so characteristic of the race, there are the French Championships and the American Championships, and then there are The Championships), he would imagine from the infantile shrieks and half-suppressed cries of emotion around him that he was in a nursery. So he is, too — save that the children are mostly from forty to sixty years old. They apply for their seats back in February, and then, firmly clutching their book of tickets in their hands, they descend upon Wimbledon in July because it re-creates for them the illusion of childhood.

Those who know the English will understand this. Here at Wimbledon their problems fade into insignificance. Around the finely chiseled turf of the Centre Court there is no troublesome Spanish situation to be settled, no annoying and arrogant dictators to be cajoled into Nonintervention Pacts, no unemployment or distressed areas to consider. Here everything is forgotten in the sweet thrill of Bunny Austin’s backhand down the line past Budge at the net, or Miss Round’s concluding volley against that ‘horrid Madame Mathieu.’

They also come, these children, for the thrill. Like all infants, they love to be thrilled and are thrilled by the smallest things: by Borotra’s tumble into the lap of a pretty girl in the front row of the stands; by Austin tossing his racket in a pet on the ground when he loses an important point; by the strap of Miss Round’s slip breaking during a vital rally; by Bitsy’s somersault as he chases Cramm’s deep smash. From these and similar happenings they get their thrills.

These thrills are doubled after the matches as they take the Underground at Southfields and read the events of the afternoon in the late editions, with the thrills printed in large black type: ‘ AUSTIN’S UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT - MISS ROUND’S STRAP BREAKS - BOROTRA FALLS IN GIRL’S LAP.’

Perhaps the most amazing phenomenon at Wimbledon is the tea hour. Promptly at half-past four every afternoon there is a sudden buzz and rising in the stands much like the seventh-inning stretching at an American baseball game. This is the Children’s Hour, and the children are going to have tea. ‘Silence, please,’ calls the umpire from his chair, but the buzz and hum continues like the noise in an apiary, until half the seats are empty. They pour out en masse to the tea garden in the rear, where blackfrocked odalisques of the Messrs. Lyons lean over them asking the discreet question which is heard throughout the British Empire: —

‘India or China, please?’

The match on the Centre Court may be the most exciting of the week, the most exciting of the whole tournament, or the most exciting ever seen; but tennis is tennis, and tea is something else again.

Half the audience, however, remain in their seats. Do they dispense with the national elixir? Not at all. This elderly lady behind me will spend twenty dollars for her seat and the same amount for her husband’s place during The Championships, but she will not waste money on tea. Neither will she waste time away from her gods, the heroes of the Centre Court. As her neighbors rise and climb over her to the exit, she pulls out a small leather attaché case in which is a thermos of tea, with two cups, two saucers, two forks, two knives, two spoons, and two sandwiches. She hands the gray-haired gentleman beside her his cup and saucer, his spoon and sandwich, pours his tea, and then pours her own.

Never once taking her eyes from the court, she drinks the tea, eats the sandwich, puts back the utensils, snaps closed the attaché case. Every day before two in the afternoon she is there, and every night at seven-thirty, when all the good matches are finished and two Yugoslavs no one ever heard of are fighting a couple from Sweden, she remains, her eyes fixed upon the match. When it is over and the Centre Court is put to bed for the night with its protecting tarpaulin, she leaves regretfully, casting longing glances behind her at this Holy of Holies which she must quit for twelve hours.

During the fortnight, over 300,000 persons see tennis at Wimbledon, many standing in line and paying three shillings merely for the privilege of seeing the electric scoreboard inside the grounds flash the results from the Centre Court to which entrance is denied them. Only the English would pay three shillings to see nothing. Three shillings is little enough, however. For some of us the tournament was more expensive. Arriving on the opening day, I found no more press seats available, and it was therefore necessary to buy a seat at a cost of six pounds, or thirty dollars. Is there any other sporting event in the world save Wimbledon where an accredited representative of the press who traveled three thousand miles to cover a tournament would be obliged to pay for his seat?

The French have the right idea. They found no way of getting their newspaper men into Wimbledon, so one day they discovered there were no seats for the English newspaper men at the French Championships at Roland Garros. Sir Thomas McAra, of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, immediately flew to Paris, where, in a ten-minute conversation with Monsieur Drigny of the French Sporting Press, an agreement was reached and tickets for the Englishmen were found. The infernal inferiority complex which overcomes every American in front of a Britisher prevents our newspaper authorities from taking steps of this kind, and the scandal of Wimbledon goes on.

My most interesting moments in England this summer were not on the Centre Court, but in an office on the Embankment in London. Here I saw for the first time a sporting event actually taking place many miles away. Imagine a large radio console with an aperture about a foot square, an opaque substance which lightens up as you darken the room. Suddenly you see the court. Then a close-up of the players. There is Parker returning the ball, so plain you can see the stripe on his shorts, and the lines on the court where the turf was freshly mowed the night before. With this vivid picture the commentary seems unnecessary and even redundant. It is some few seconds before the speaker can describe the point, and already you have seen the ball in play.

It may be too early to talk of technological unemployment in the field of radio, but I expect before many years to be selling apples with the genial Mr. Ted Husing at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street.